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12 Oz. Mouse and Postmodernism
I'm going to say right now that 12 Ounce Mouse has been one of the most annoying things for me to review. Ever. The cartoon that looks like animated MS paint drawings as actually demanded more research than any other review thus far, which is why it's so late. This is because there are only 3 things that 12 Ounce Mouse can be. 1.) A lazy piece of shit with no effort. 2.) Dada art. Also known as "high class trolling" or "creating a piece of shit and calling it art while being pretentious about its validity as art" 3.) Postmodern art. So... what is postmodernism? Confusing as hell. If you want an accurate and complete definition of the philosophy or the type of art, you're not going to find one. It boils down to this: Postmodernism is the belief that there is no absolute truths. Except maybe... that there is no absolute truth. Postmodern works of art deliberately go against established "rules" of art. In postmodernism there is no boundaries between genres, or anything else really. Postmodernism seeks to question why certain conventions are in place. They do this by intentionally creating things that break those common conventions. People saying that "writers/creators should be able to do anything they want" are most likely engaged in postmodernist thought. Andy Warhol filmed the Empire State Building for eight hours in one continuous shooting. That was the whole movie. John Cage had a symphony where he played no music for four and a half minutes. Both of them are postmodernist works. Specifically the "minimalist" school in postmodernism. At best it tries to get people to think of why certain conventions of storytelling are necessary. Both of these things fail because they drop ALL of the conventions. Let me put it this way: I can't appreciate the architecture in my own country if you throw me in a completely foreign country where I don't know the language, customs, or culture. Good postmodernism is said to challenge you, and make you think. John Cage's silence had the beautiful thought "there never really can be silence." Done bad, it feels like someone is calling you an idiot for not getting what's super obvious. Postmodernism frustrates a lot of people. This is because it tries to pose a question to you in an alien language while being pretentious about the answer. It demands examination while making it as hard as possible to do such a thing. There are two pieces of work. They're made by two different people, but they want to convey the same thing. One of them is a postmodernist and another one is a modernist. They both question why people do horrible things -The postmodernist will have their "hero" go on and commit genocide while getting praise for it, and suffering no consequence within the work. -The modernist will have their "hero" make awful decisions, which eventually leads to genocide, and face the consequences of what they've done. They can both communicate the same ideas... except that postmodernism by definition has a hard time with the communication aspect. In both of these stories, the artist wants to communicate why people do horrible things. The first one will make you angry or sad. The second one will make you understand. Making art with postmodernism is like trying to talk to someone else without words. If you're dancing around like an idiot, you can't really fault the guy you're trying to talk to when he doesn't understand what you're trying to say. Does postmodernism have purpose? Yes. It's there to challenge conventions that the artist KNOWS are bunk. They've learned the convention, and why it's used, and they're able to think of a way that it can be circumvented. As a corollary to "there is no universal truth" it might be wise to say "just because you don't want it to be true, doesn't mean it isn't." So, let's talk about 12 Ounce Mouse. If it is postmodern, it's a meta narrative that questions why you can't speak sign language through a mega phone. By dropping all conventions, it accurately explains the usage of none of them. Postmodern art seems to remove reason... and has nothing to replace it with. Bad postmodern art anyway. And 12 Ounce Mouse replaces reason with nothing. 12 Ounce Mouse questions why it's necessary for a cartoon to have good animation by having bad animation. In doing so, it answers its own question (I'll get into that during the actual review). It questions why things like continuity are important. While showing why continuity is important. I don't think it's doing those latter things on purpose. You see, good postmodern art actually works without the conventions that it's trying to convey. Good postmodern animation can be seen in the works of Don Hertzfeldt, who actually has his own YouTube channel. The paradox of questioning "meaning" is that if you don't provide a good answer, you have no meaning and thus are redundant and unnecessary. 12 Ounce Mouse's answer is that... "it's necessary." Like bad postmodern art, it explains why the pieces that it removes are necessary. And because it removes so much, it doesn't give any insight into the pieces it removes. And if it's a meta commentary on bad meta commentary it's redundant. It's like saying that the sky is blue. Everyone knows that bad meta commentary is needlessly convoluted, and people will praise it as high art simply because it's incoherent. Let me put it this way. I could make a video that's nothing but me saying pineapple for 25 minutes while random candy flashes on the screen. It could say all kinds of things about my audience, or the YouTube community, or attention spans or whatever. However, it'll be a terrible video. Or it'll be terrible "art." I can subscribe meaning to it, and so could any postmodernist. It won't have meaning. It'll be a video where random candy flashes on the screen while I say pineapple for 25 minutes. And yes, that is the absolute truth. If I did claim it was art, it would be bad art. Anything that I've attempted to communicate to the viewer would be completely lost. Unless I was trying to make them angry. And I still believe trolling to be wrong. Art is a type of communication, whether to yourself or to culture as a whole. It's about putting your ideas into the world. Even postmodern art tries to communicate something. I'm sure Andy Warhol was trying to "say" something when he designed Cambell's Soup label, or filmed the Empire State Building for eight straight hours. But only the artist will ever truly know, like it's some kind of in-joke. What do I get out of this? That simplicity sells and loitering wasn't against the law in New York City in the 1960's. Many postmodern works are made with specifically no meaning. "Why would the author do such a thing? It doesn't make sense." If you want to go with that philosophy of postmodernism, then Minecraft is the greatest postmodern masterpiece in history. I'm not kidding. Minecraft has no meaning. It drops many established conventions of its medium and genre (to the point of almost inventing a new one), and it allows the player to find their own meaning with what's available. Cambell's Soup cans don't really leave much in the way of allowing for the viewer's insight. Here's the thing: Minecraft confuses no one. While accessibility is one of its bigger problems, once someone can access it, they actually get a lot out of it, beyond what the artist could have ever determined on their own. Don't I believe in death of the author? Yes. And that seems to be a stance that postmodernism as a whole rejects. A common defense to a postmodernist work is "you just don't get it." Well... here's the thing. In my world, that's a problem with the art, not the viewer (at least to a certain extent). And yes, there's a problem with being too preachy about what you're trying to tell. You know those episodes of Family Guy that just drops the plot to preach to you about some random stupid moral? In a good modernist work, that moral goes without saying. In any postmodernist work, there's no plot to begin with. Seeing two characters going through a journey and learning about a message will always be more effective than no characters being there at all and the message just being there. "There's no such thing as bad postmodernism" someone told me. Well, if that's true there's no such thing as good postmodernism, and I shouldn't be able to tell the difference (which I can). But if we went on that premises, either the art... let's call it a genre... is either entirely good, or entirely bad. One of the most famous postmodern works is a urinal. But no, I do not think that postmodernism is entirely good or entirely bad. Pastiches, genre blending, meta commentary. They all have useful purpose. But when Christopher Nolan spends too much time analyzing his own characters and plots, people turn away. People have said that Family Guy gets more postmodern with each season. Everyone also says that Family Guy gets worse with each new season. Many people think that postmodernism is a way to be really lazy with their art (just like with comedy, and writing for children, and writing for any specific demographic, and writing erotica. This seems to be a pattern). Let me tell you, it's very difficult to write a play where several random audience members get be a part of the act (blindsiding them with this fact), and get a standing ovation at the end. And this is assuming that 12 Ounce Mouse is trying to postmodern. I mean, it could just be some guy thinking that nonsensical plots and five second drawings would make good television and is laughing their ass off that people are actually buying this stuff. But... benefit of the doubt.